Psychedelic Prayers - Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll 18

Psychedelic Prayers

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Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll 18

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“And what of the Mysteries?” the prince asked his young bride-to-be as she prepared for her initiation ritual. She turned to face her lover and straightened his raiment before combing the articulate lengths of her artistic fingers through tangling strands of his chestnut hair. Racheal opened her mouth to reply but no sound had emerged, and the young shaman castigated himself for his tactlessness when a bulging meniscus of water threatened to limn her staring blue eyes with a salty flow.

Ram’yana was amazed at the extraordinary degree of his lover’s composure after her overnight ordeal. It was hardly surprising she didn’t wish to speak of it; Particularly now, he decided, when her initiation trip is afoot.

He was unfazed by the fact that his lady had doubtless omitted many thorny details of her encounter with the other group of magi. He’d heard enough to gain a goodly notion of the terror, abject awe, naked exposure and enforced exaltation which Racheal had been subjected to, amidst the snatches of information she’d earlier managed to impart during brief moments of privacy in their upstairs boudoir. He couldn’t help but imagine varying versions of the remainder of her tribulations, and winced at his unseemly inner reactions to many of the images flitting through his stunned but imaginative mind.

He waited while Racheal completed her preparations. She’d inspected her costume in the dresser’s oval mirror, where a tiny photograph of her parents shone down upon the teen’s self-critical examination. The snapshot was affixed to the scalloped glass edge with a sliver of transparent tape and had been cut in twain by serrated scissors; the Lady Racheal customarily destroyed most every record of her unique visage that fell into her hands. “Like hair and fingernails,” she often remarked.

She regularly burned all her self-portraits, whether quick sketches drawn in darkly toned charcoal (withered monochrome Rembrandts staring from tempestuous horizons projected from her azure eyes) or detailed, multilayered psychedelic acrylics, pastels and oils - emotionally revealing and challenging pictures which had taken many tortuous hours to complete. The artistic witch girl toiled with boundless concentration until she judged the images to be “perfected enough for immortalising immolation,” as she’d informed Ram’yana when he first discovered her in the act of virtual self-destruction.

He’d had a hard time keeping her away from his collection of photographs, many of which featured his magical paramour. Serendipitously captured or carefully framed portraits, nudes and ‘normal’ happy snap photos – solo shots or those showing other members of the tribe - had a habit of regularly disappearing, or reappearing in desecrated remnants with Racheal cut and sundered from the photographic record.

After a nonce she spoke, surprising him back into the present. “I… ’tis difficult… inherently mysterious, after all…” He truly hadn’t expected a reply, and as Racheal continued the shaman stilled his tongue and tucked long wavy strands behind his elongated ears. “Everything was emptying into white, and…” Her gaze swivelled to face Ram’s image in the depths of the mirror. White rings of sclera encircled her irises in the flickering candlelight.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said, stroking her naked spine beneath the tight bolero jacket. He caressed her cheek with the flat of his palm and long-nailed fingertips burrowed into the lush wheaten waves above her temple. “Be happy.”

They’d both smiled into the mirror while Racheal’s pulse raced beneath his fingers. She swallowed and enfolded his free hand in hers while they regarded their reflections. “I am,” she assured him. “Deliriously. It’s just… two initiations in as many nights…” She leaned her head against his shoulder with a sigh while golden strands slipped through his fingers. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be,” she breathed into his hair, clutching his hand with an insuperable grip. “But after this moon I want to go away – somewhere alone, just us, without the tribe...”

“I love thee,” Ram’yana had declared, using the all-purpose phrase that best served to answer all lovers’ questions, dissolving all interpersonal conundrums in the aqua regia of its mesmerising spell. The words passed through Racheal and bounced back in return, metronomic waves that vibrated both young lovers’ heartstrings to the same thunderous resonance. “I love thee, too,” she’d replied to his reflection with all the impassioned yearning in her teenage heart.

Even amid the upwelling spring of confidence evoked by her declaration, even as all Racheal’s hopes were pinned to the palimpsest of Ram’s incarnate soul by those simple four words, the prince felt a faltering discomfort within the magnanimous swell of his chest. Even as the Centraxian priest and priestess stared into their images in the mirrored world he felt a cold memory of death’s hand at his core, and recognised her timeworn endearment’s hopeless inadequacy.

How could three or four little syllables possibly express the swollen tide of undying attachment Ram’yana felt for his wondrous witch-bride? Yet his self-flagellating nature couldn’t allow the prince to be satisfied with so simplistic a criticism and he impaled his dwindling composure on the horns of an oft-contemplated dilemma:

I love thee, he thought as he stared into Racheal’s querulous eyes. The uniting phrase had been abused and used by so many for so long that words intended to signify unity are now weighted with thick accretions of emotional and conceptual separation. Ram’yana now sees that every time he utters the words “I love thee” or “I love you”, an ineluctable thrill of blessed union pours through him with an irresistible blinding rush. The phrase is an undifferentiating call to love itself, beckoning to the source of all bright beginnings and sumptuous spawnings. In human throats it’s a binding spell, he decided. The words are an addiction, calling forth ever stronger emotional glues; the tie that binds and blinds. An adhesion… the ultimate addiction, just like life…

As he stared into Racheal’s reflection his thoughts spun a web through their bedchamber, outlining the myriad connexions that interlinked them as lovers in the strangely feuding neo-medieval world of their rebirth. I love thee… If used without true awareness, the ubiquitous spell created a breach between lovers and the rest of the world – creating a nation of two in a polarised universe of ‘us’ and ‘them’. If applied to a single individual or relationship it easily became a self-fulfilling prophecy of apparent uniqueness, a binding catechistic catchcry of narcissistically blind mutual reinforcement. Whenever either lover intoned the magical phrase the other repeated it automatically, followed by another telling word; “I love thee, too.”

After the slowly turning phases of a handful of anciently pockmarked moons had smiled down upon their love-blessed union, the teenage mage had arrived at a telling realisation; the soul-fusing affirmation of the most archetypically loving words was a truly hypnotic spell, doubtless instilled in the wild children of humankind through aeons or artifice, to encourage continuous fertile fucking and unending reproduction. And provide a better reason for living than a lone existence…

The romantically minded young shaman believed – knew - that love and loving could be so much more than a mechanistic mating of mindless grinding and humping, could exalt lovers’ beings and perceptions to unparalleled states of ecstatic grace. But he was also aware that all elements and levels of creation function together, making use of the same underlying terrain. Survival is the lowest common denominator of life or consciousness, and life always calls to other life in a yearning paean for confirmation in any and every manner possible; ‘I love you’ is question, affirmation, confirmation and hypnotic spell, all in one neat little hormone-pumping package.

The bonding spiel had doubtless issued from the lips of putative primordial Eve and Adam in the fruitful planetary garden of the Great Mother. ‘I love thee’ had been affixed to the lips of domesticated primates through the ingraining repetitions of groove-scarred eons. The words could not have been better designed to bring forth the deepest forms of cross pollination possible between female and male, or within any other relationships rooted in cooperative separation - physical or otherwise.

“Love,” the shaman murmured as his mind scrolled through a library of implications. While ‘love’ is a concept and feeling that opens one’s heart to the abundant all and confirms the holographic interconnectedness of every thing and being (the heart of the Hermetic doctrine, whose key tenet is inadequately translated ‘as above, so below’), the words ‘I love you’ are of a very different order. The phrase all too often becomes a reciprocal I.O.U. that stands between two lovers, a barrier of indebted expectation that sunders their unspeakable unity.

Unenlightened minds exist at one stage removed from the pulse of a reality which they continually weave from the mindstuff of energetic matter. “I love you, too” is a homonym of “I love you two”, and the innocent child mind dwelling within the core of all adults and adolescents creates its own interpretations of such naively spoken words. The clear-sighted inner child is each being’s omnipotent personal deity and challenging daemon, yet is always yearning for parental attention, peering forth with a lonely perspective from the uncompromising one-pointed purview of inner sense, of conscience. And it takes things very literally.

The telling phrase “I love you, too” creates a mirror maze of partly intended consequences for any who blithely utter the dichotomy-laden spell. When duality enters the unfactored equation of infinite love, lovers cannot create a self-blessing union of one from two; three are made from two instead, as purblind primates go forth and divisively multiply. They reproduce their most personal unexamined primal dilemma, to embody its needful imperative through further generations of incarnations – asking their children to answer the real question; “What is it that loves?”

Thus the illusory separateness of individuality is reaffirmed, and couples are oft destined to be sundered in twain by their own self-ordained ‘subconscious’ declaration of loving – not by the universal benediction of undifferentiating love that droppeth like the gentle rain on every one and all, but by a species of possession.

The shaman’s internal discourse had dribbled to a trickle when his witch wife addressed him. Ram’yana dispelled the upwelling thought-stream from his expanding mind with a vulpine shake of his hirsute head; “Is this what it’s supposed to be like?” Racheal had asked. “Coming on, I mean.” His eyes melted into hers in the mirror. “Why?” he asked through strangely grizzled throat. “What’s it like for you?”

She ticked the points off on his fingers. “Thoughts racing through my head, booming and echoing as though someone’s screaming them through a bullhorn; auras around everything, live or inanimate. And the world seems so much clearer – everything’s lit from within and pulsing with the same beat…”

“That’s what coming on is like, alright; it’s like that for me, too. Just wait… this is only the gebinning.” Racheal looked at him askance. “Aye,” he said, “we’re tripping – but have no fear, love – I’ll stay with thee, all through the night.”

“As always, my love.” She turned from the mirror and tenderly kissed his lips one by one. After a few moments neither could sense where their ‘own’ body ended and the familiar sensual borderland of their lover’s form began. Several senses were warping and melding in pleasurable distortions as the lysergic acid burned through their normal perspectives and dislocated opening minds from their usual preoccupations and preconceptions. “I feel so dizzy,” Racheal said into Ram’s hair. “Let’s sit down for a minute.”

Racheal arranged her cloak about her shoulders as she dropped into a scrunching beanbag. The shaman reached for a book on the desk and opened the slim tome at a random page. His voice began reciting the words before he had time to examine them in advance.

*

“Is it a dream?

Shadowy

Elusive

Invisible

All things, all images move slowly

Within shimmering nets

Here essence endures

From here all forms emerge

All forms emerge from this second

Back to the ancient beginning”

*

“What’s that? Racheal asked as Ram’yana knelt beside her to display the book’s cover. “‘Psychedelic Prayers’,” she read aloud. “Timothy Leary?” He passed the paperback into her hands and she flipped through dog-eared pages to find the first entry. “They’re designed to help you make your way through a trip. Like a Book of the Dead for psychedelic journeys,” he told her. Ram’s fingers glided up and down her thigh. “Most are psychedelic Taoist meditations adapted from Lao Tsu…”

“‘The Guide’…” She began to recite aloud while he kissed the nape of her neck.

*

“‘In the greatest sessions

One does not know that there is a guide.

In the next best sessions

One praises the guide

It is worse when

One fears the guide

The worst is that

One pays him

If the guide lacks trust in the people

Then

The trust of the people will be lacking

The wise guide guards his words

The wise guide sits serenely

When the greatest session is over

The people will say –

‘It all happened naturally’

Or

‘It was so simple, we did it all ourselves’.”

*

Racheal closed the book. “Wow,” she said as she handed the thin tome back. “Please read some more, love.” She leant her head against his shoulder and placed a palm upon his chest. “Your voice is getting so deep…”

“Love to,” he agreed. “The first few are designed to be read while coming on, so let’s find one of those – but after that I’ll have to start banishing the circle for thy initiation.” He cleared his throat before beginning;

*

“‘When the harmony is lost

Then come the clever discussions and

‘Wise men’ appear

When the unity is lost

Then come ‘friends’

When the session is plunged into disorder

Then there are ‘doctors’.” *

*

He passed the book over to his wise-eyed bride to be. “Food for thought,” he’d said, and kissed her before standing to make his way to the door while she thumbed through the pages. He nodded toward the mirror. “Soon you’ll have a chance to pass into the world beyond the looking glass…” They kissed again, more deeply, and after a few seconds Ram’yana knew he’d be unable to tear himself from Racheal’s embrace if he stayed a moment longer.

The tribal hierophant slipped his tongue from her mouth and his hands from beneath her skirt and left their bedchamber to begin the magical consecrations required to transform the longhall into a temporary temple; Empress Ringell, T’Ruth and Princess Stardew had already begun inscribing and clearing the macrocosmic circle.

Racheal returned the book to the marble-topped desk and opened her purse to withdraw a small tablet, swallowing it without a second thought. Better late than never, she reassured herself while the contraceptive pill slithered down her throat. As she’d stared into her image a pale nimbus swelled around her head and shoulders and a glowing haze pulsed from within the glittering sapphire refractions of her reflective red-rimmed eyes.

Better the devil you know…

“Thy past life regression is yet to come, milady. The night’s mirror magic must be allowed to settle, so the archetype of the Trump – thy new role - can consolidate within thee.” The Hierophant’s words engender dancing shapes which cavort between the lovers’ interlocked eyes, twirling in a luminal language of shifting eldritch colours.

Concepts spin forth from his multicoloured lips, delineated by a complexity of shifting three dimensional shapes that flow into a single perpetually transforming form – a transparing multihued hologram that displays the passage of immortal ideal ideas, mutating with a heartbeat pulse of organic asymmetry.

Each thought-form transforms into another artfully embodied concept before the Lady Racheal can fully apprehend their continually transmogrifying portents. Her senses whirl as she tastes the thoughts and familiar emotions of her shaman lover, mingled with mental flavours of the strange other being – uncannily similar to herself in flavour and personality – who swims in the backwaters of her braincase. She senses the wild-land wisdom of the stranger within, feels the overlay of a new perspective as her unknown other incarnation slowly grows accustomed to the brave new world of the Centraxian High Priestess; Feels just like me, the dazed and dazzled Lady Racheal decides. The same blood… in a similar vein…

“One can’t be expected to endure two life-changing experiences in a single night!” Count Marco proclaims into his goblet. “Besides,” the Lady Ringell exhorts, “there’s an appropriate time for arcane ritual - and a time befitting sex and drugs and rock and roll, baby!” The Centraxian Empress squeals and throws a red feather boa over Marco’s shoulder. “Particularly when one and all are tripping off their gaudy gourds!”

“Our High Priestess at last,” Marco announces. “And what an illuminating rite!”

“Indeed,” Fifi agrees with a solemn nod toward Racheal. “Thou art a new woman, my lady. We’ll have to discuss it at length, but not ’til after the party – ’tis in thy honour!” Fifi L’Amour the Lady Ringell has disrobed after the rite’s conclusion, revealing a full-length silk gown marbled in scarlet and deep shades of magenta, adorned with an abstruse geometrical web of black corded trimmings. Gilded, silvered and emerald braids coil about her shoulders and fulsome bosom like twisted serpentine familiars and pearl earrings swing in counterpoint to the giddy bobbing of her smile-dimpled face. “And of course,” she laughs, “the first choice of males is thine by right!” Fifi’s ongoing giggles transform into a guffaw and her dilated pupils flicker with reflected candlelight as she readjusts the leafy herbal halo of her leafy floral crown.

Racheal’s gaze flicks toward the chortling Empress and she sees the warping fabric of her own mind reflected within Fifi L’Amour’s laughing eyes, and glittering beneath and betwixt a pale blue light shining from the initiate’s brow. Fifi’s laughter extends, ascending toward unbridled hilarity. Stardew and T’Ruth (Fifi’s fellow initiates in the ‘Magic Group’, or the Dawn of Ra, also members of the Empress’s Centraxian tripartite working group, or tri-aan) join in the contagious chorus of helpless giggles that arise from sundry sectors of the populous longhall in response to the Lady Ringell’s unconstrained peals of laughter.

The tribal tri-aan all glow within a tenuous nimbus of the same fey azure light. A ghostly shimmer of ephemeral pastel patterns shifts within the contoured shells of their smooth white skins, shaping the fluid vessels of their feminine bodies. It’s as if all the women’s undeniably palpable physicality is an insubstantial parade of projections, extensions of their teenage High Priestess’s blown open awareness.

Racheal feels their movements and merriment as extrusions of her own intent. She feels her will moving through the bodies of all her tribal peers as the trio of witches echo and enacts the unbidden procession of her reactive thoughts, a script that flows like an unceasing torrent through the amortised bioplasmic landscape of her hallucinogen-fired mind.

Or am I an extension of them? Racheal wonders. The eldritch presence within – now omnipresent after the priestess’s initiatory trip through the looking glass - rises to the surface of her awareness. She senses a ripple of empathic wisdom from that other priestess who rides the tides of flesh and blood alongside her, sharing her unique perspective in a strange and novel world. Are we all each other, really? She feels the other’s smile within her, curling the tips of her mortal lips, and Racheal’s mind swirls into the maw of a tumultuous maelstrom.

A thousand thoughts stream through the plexus of her consciousness from a hundred different directions, a susurrus of murmuring minds converging through the centre of her brain and twisting away into unfathomable directions, transuded and rechannelled by the fleet bright instant of contact with the nuclear core of her unfettered wild will.

Love, she hears with a sense beyond hearing. Ram’s familiar hand closes around hers and Racheal’s palm slips along the supersensitised surface of her smooth naked thigh, impelled by his subtle pressure. She realises she’s been staring into all three of the Empress Ringell’s bright laughing eyes while vision and reverie have transported her through prismatic refractions of her fracturing self. She feels loose, a shifting veil barely anchored to her body – save for the place where her young man’s fingers interlace through hers to stroke the pale skin of her inner thigh.

When the new High Priestess of Centraxis hurriedly looks away from the penetrative squint of Fifi’s beamish tripartite glare, she sees that her lover’s titian skin shines with the same luminescence; a beacon of light limns Ram’s high forehead with a glowing nimbus, and a similar pearlescent sheen suffuses the entire magical clan in her vision’s periphery. Her lover’s lambent gaze arrests Racheal’s attention. She stares into the mesmerising glare of his regard, feeling her every thought and nuance of emotion mirrored within his being.

The shamanic prince’s fingers entwine around hers while his nails slide along her leg muscle. Long strands of chestnut hair brush against her forearm, and the simultaneous rush of subtle sensuousness fully awakens Racheal to the interdependent reality of his presence - and the imperative urges stirring within her. Love… Her head swivels to face him, apparently of its own volition; twisting toward the compass point of Ram’s equally psychoactivated consciousness. Love…

Her shaman prince’s mind is inside her; as their fingers clasp she feels his thoughts entwining round hers. A spectral image of Racheal’s truest self flares through her inner sight - a splendid vision of a wondrously beautiful young woman, as seen through Ram’s rainbow-sprayed emerald eyes. When the priestess glances away from the Hierophant’s blinding gaze, the breathtaking paragon of feminine glory persists as a hovering phantasm floating in the centre of her vision, superimposed over every thing, wherever she looks.

Is this how he sees me? She shakes her head to dispel the self-aggrandising image. Her eyes blink upon clotted scrums of anarchic tribe members arrayed around the Centraxian longhall, and she sees the same light shining at the brows of all her fellow initiated peers of the realm. The wondrous image of her self projected into her mind by her loving mate is still overlain upon them all. I can feel what they feel…

Is it the acid? Racheal wonders while querulous waves pass through her quivering soma; …or the initiation, or… and an inward voice speaks up in reply, surprising her with a confident note of definitive inner surety: Second sight is neither curse nor blessing… It simply is. The perfect image of Racheal’s mirrored self fades away into the longhall.

Even though the windows are flung open to the cooling night air and the curtains held back by velvet cords, fragrant clouds of frankincense and hashish have thickened in the chamber. Now that the witching hour has passed and the tribal shaman has banished the macrocosmic circle of the Lady Racheal’s initiation ceremony, the subsequent festivities have already commenced.

This is what’s meant by ‘becoming thy Role’. The phrase echoes through Racheal’s transparent head and issues from the mouths of her peers in tantalising fragments of meaning-fraught multiplicities; “becoming enrolled…” ‘strumming a solo…’ “been on a roll…” ‘she’s coming on now…’ Segments of words in the outer world echo the repetitive thoughts that resounds in her mind, interchangeable cogs iterating Racheal’s hallucinatory cogitation; Being in role…

Sections of sentences shine out in the clashing cacophony of conversations; “…going out for a stroll...” ‘be fucking outrageous…’ “…better kick that goal…” ‘…be coming over…’ “for whom the bell tolls…” ‘…all over, Red Rover…’ “Bring on the rock and roll!” – this last from the effusive Lord Kha-Aan, who spikes the air with an upward-pointed finger in convincing simulacrum of righteous drunken indignation.

Princess Stardew and her sister T’Ruth recline on satin cushions at the Lady Racheal’s bare primate feet; in the priestess’s artistically inclined hallucinatory sight her bared organic form appears as a strange knobbly conjunction of sinew, bone, hair, flesh, light and shadow; her paint-streaked toenails appear superfluous and inappropriate as lipstick on a pig. Is that my thought or yours?

Am I mine? It’s impossible to tell which thought is hers and which emanates from the other, inner priestess. She focuses on Stardew and T’Ruth, watches the angelic features of both sisters warp and twist as they gossip and laugh, baring each emotion that rides concealed within the shadows of their outspoken declarations. They giggle over everything and nothing as Stardew passes up a joint, holding it out in offering to their High Priestess. Racheal watches her fingers envelop the smouldering paper tube, moving like the plastic-coated digits of a convoluted automaton. Is that me?

Me? The thought resonates through all present and a momentary lull washes over the party. A dozen eyes glace toward their High Priestess. Did I say that aloud? A handful of partygoers continue to stare at various portions of her anatomy, partially revealed by Racheal’s brief apparel amid flickering candlelight. The newest member of the court sits enthroned upon a high chair which is draped in kangaroo fur and cowhide and festooned with glittering frostings of pre-christmas pagan tinsel. The tops of the throne bear a pale pair of bovine horns, curving away from the priestess’s blonde waves.

One side of the seat’s high wooden back is surmounted by a stuffed white barn owl, which whispers inarticulate wisdom into Racheal’s left ear as she surveys the court; Who, it murmurs, Who, Hu? Her lover leans against the other side of her body and strokes her upper leg with her perspiring right palm. A swathe of peacock feathers is arrayed about her golden mane, crowning the summit of the throne between the horns.

The Lady Racheal feels she’s the centre of attention; whether they’re obviously staring at her in lusty fixation or apparently engaged in entirely different pursuits, she feels the attentions of all persons present, moving like serpents inside her. She sits beside the yawing fireplace; the atmosphere is so steamy that the fire remains unlit. A stack of readied kindling is revealed as Li Po and Arne Stook remove the large silk-draped mirror that customarily serves as focal point for the tribe’s initiation ceremonies.

“Here,” Fifi insists as Vostra appears with a chilled magnum of bubbly. “’Tis high time for some champers – and Moet, no less!” She hands a hollow-stemmed glass to the Lady Racheal, employing the latest in local Oz vernacular – ‘Mowie’ - while Prince Ram’yana does the honours. “Don’t be so proper,” Fifi commands when she sees the teenage mage covering the cork with his palm. “It doesn’t need a condom! Let it fly free! Launch it across the longhall! And may the goddess bless all who sail in her!” She winks at the priestess and nods in her direction as Kha-Aan strolls by.

Ram pulls the cork free with a satisfying pop; it sails across the heads of the partying crew in a stately arc and sails right through the bars of a tall window opening onto the main street. “A hole in one!” the Empress enthuses. The Lady Ringell intercepts the frothing flow with a hastily placed glass and Vostra clinks a pair of flutes in place beside it as the champagne bubbles forth. “Bodes well,” Fifi says.

“But then again, he always finds a hole in one,” T’Ruth opines from Ram’s feet, speaking in a very primly enunciated dialect of the Queen’s English. Stardew’s poetically inclined sister is dressed in a hastily snipped and sewn grey hessian sack and her face is painted an electric shade of blue. Her hair is a white mass of sifting ash gleaned from the fireplace.

“Moetry in potion,” Prince Ram’yana rumbles in her direction, surprising himself anew with the deepening timbre of his nearly post-adolescent voice. Am I still getting bigger? He hands the bottle to Vostra, who steers the magnum around the hall. Or is it the acid?

The Clearlight LSD is definitely responsible for quite a few other interesting changes in the malleable fabric of reality. Ram’s body feels weightless in the moonlight shining down at an angle through the ornate plaster ceiling, laminating the assembled lords and ladies, princesses and princes, knaves and pages with an impossible silvery sheen. Psychedelic patterns swirl across the painted membrane of the ceiling and stitch disparate op-art posters together on the graffito-covered walls. The shaman prince has erected none of his usual lighting equipment beyond a single colour wheel focused in the centre of the longhall, yet a stronger, brighter glow emanates from everywhere and nowhere as he surveys the prismatically colourful candlelit scene.

Ram’s incipient frown swiftly twists to a grin. The young shaman prince doesn’t want to distract or upset his bride-to-be with his secret discomfort on her night of nights, and covers his grimace with a hearty smile. He caresses her thigh as he hides the swell of pain throbbing in his chest, a dim yet unsettling redolence of the searing rent in space-time – the rendezvous with immortality that had turned him inside out when his heart stood still; almost a year ago now. +

Ram’s pulse pounds in his temples and throbs beneath his left armpit. Trickles of perspiration wend circuitous pathways down the sides of his cheeks and softly bristled throat, soaking into the collar of his green velvet tunic. It isn’t strychnine… The shaman ruminates in urgent self-diagnosis while psychedelic music pours through his soul, filling the chamber with most every tripper’s favourite classic tracks. Merely a memory, he reassures himself as he releases his fears, consciously slowing and deepening the narrowed range of his breathing.

‘…The lunatic is on the grass

Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs,

Got to keep the loonies on the path…’

The Lady Ringell raises her glass and salutes the court’s new living trump, shouting loudly enough to be heard through the intertwining knots of competing and complementary conversations. “To the Lady Racheal!” Fifi announces; “High Priestess and Divine Oracle to the Court of Centraxis!” The entire hall dribbles to a semblance of silence as everyone present raises cups, joints, chillums and bongs aloft.

“To the High Priestess Racheal!” Lord Kha-Aan’s voice leads the surprisingly cogent chorus that rises to fill the gurgling space left by Fifi’s brief toast. His booming tones precede him as he paces back into the hall, resounding from the rear of the building. He enters the chamber bearing a large silver chalice, holding the goblet above his proud wreathe-crowned head as he sings along with the Pink Floyd.

‘…The lunatic is in the hall

The lunatics are in my hall

The paper holds their folded faces to the floor

And every day the paper boy brings more…’

The teenage priestess begins to stand, but thinks better of the notion when the room spins around the central axis of Lord Kha-Aan’s concentrated gaze. His singing voice is pitched surprisingly deeply and improbably loud. The Na-Baron stares into Racheal’s core from the chamber’s threshold, penetrating the veil of her hallucinations with all the enflaming insistence of his indomitable and cavalier determination.

The rest of the court imbibes drink or smoke or both whilst they eye their liege with sundry looks over the rims of goblets, flutes, cups or bongs. Kha-Aan’s gaze slips to one side as he steps forward to make room for Arne Stook and Lord Cyber, who manhandle a large keg into the chamber and drag it toward the nearest corner.

Racheal unfastens the silver dragon clasp that gathers the constricting robe at her breast and drops her blue cloak onto the ceremonial throne behind her. She shakes her long blonde hair free of her jacket, lungs bellowing overtime to sieve the cloying cloistered air for a trace of fresher oxygen. A chorus of singers warble a new stanza as the tripping young priestess closes her eyes to still spinning thoughts and quiet surging emotions.

‘And if the dam breaks open many years too soon

And if there is no room upon the hill

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…’ #

A True Story

Continues…

- R.A.

Images – author’s

* Psychedelic Prayers C 1966 by Timothy Leary, Academy Editions

+ See Shaman of Centraxis 4

# Brain Damage lyrics by Roger Waters (&Pink Floyd)

Further true tales of the Prince of Centraxis -

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 2 -Free World

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 3 -Stretching the Envelope

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 4 - Home to Roost

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 5 - Could It Be Any Body?

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 6 - Free Lovers

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 7 - Wild Widow's Son

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 8 - Womanimals

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 9 - Incautious Wishes

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 10 - Freedom of Choice

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 11 – Smuggled Desires

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 12 – Love the One

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 13 - Open Secrets

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 14 – Between Initiations

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 15 – Promethean Preparations

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 16 – Through the Looking Glass

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 17 – Second Arcanum

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 18 – Psychedelic Prayers

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 19 – Juggling Promises

Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 1 - Doves and Serpents

The Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater

Psychedelic Water Part 1 – Fractal Rainbow

And for further enlightenment see

The New Illuminati - http://newilluminati.blog-city.com/

Enlightenment Today

The author’s images and art - Imagine Nation

The Her(m)etic Hermit http://hermetic.blog.com/

Save the World from RamPage - http://www.geocities.com/r_ayana

TimeSpace

RingWood

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The Prince of Centraxis – http://centraxis.blogspot.com